The world of chaos and violence facing sex workers

Stephen Griffiths is questioned after his arrest. Campaigners detect no appetite for significant policy shifts to towards prostitution. Photograph: West Yorkshire Police/PA

The death of Geraldine Brocklehurst, unlike those of Susan Rushworth, Suzanne Blamires and Shelley Armitage, was not an act of almost cartoonish savagery carried out by a man with a violent personality disorder and an obsession with serial killers.

It was, rather, a casual, almost banal act of brutality by a drunk man whom she asked for a cigarette.

Brocklehurst, who was 40, was with a friend in the centre of Huddersfield on 4 October 2007 when 22-year-old Shayne Hayes walked by. As he passed, Brocklehurst asked him if he had a spare cigarette; in response he pulled out a knife and stabbed her four times in the upper body and neck. She bled to death minutes later. His barrister argued in court by way of mitigation that Hayes had been "in a state" about his relationship and had gone for a walk to "clear his head" when he encountered Brocklehurst.

The cases of Stephen Griffiths, given a full life term yesterday for the brutal, cannibalistic murders of Rushworth, Blamires and Armitage, and of Shayne Hayes may have little in common, but the lives of their victims were dispiritingly similar. All four were youngish women with chaotic lives who were working as prostitutes when they were murdered, and died because their activities made them vulnerable to violent men.

No-one knows how many women sell sex in the UK – one estimate puts the figure at 80,000, including those who work from premises and those who work on the streets – and no one knows how many have been the victims of violence, rape or worse. "When it's a covert activity, all you can do is guess, basically," says Hilary Kinnell, the former co-ordinator of the UK Network of Sex Work Projects and the author of Violence and Sex Work in Britain.

But just over four years after part-time lorry driver Steve Wright killed five women in Ipswich – murders that shocked Britain and led to calls for a new approach to prostitution – and almost exactly 30 since Peter Sutcliffe was finally arrested after killing 13 on the same Bradford streets as Griffiths, sex workers are still being murdered by those sometimes referred to as clients.

No comprehensive figure is available, but based on informal reporting through her own networks, Kinnell suggests that 134 sex workers, including a small number of transsexuals, are known or believed to have been killed since 1990.

Since Wright's spree in late 2006, she believes that number to be 15, though another recent victim, not widely reported to have been a sex worker, could take that total to 16. While a few cases like Griffiths's convulse the news media, most victims are barely noted outside their home towns and barely mourned beyond their families. Not a single national paper carried a mention of Geraldine Brocklehurst's death or the conviction of her killer.

While no change in legislation or shift in policing policy will be able to stop every determined killer, campaigners hoped that, particularly after the Ipswich killings, an examination of the laws around prostitution and a better public and police understanding of the risks faced by sex workers might begin to make their lives safer. Prostitution attracts passionate argument on both sides of the debate, with campaigners who work with sex workers such as the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) arguing vocally in favour of more liberal vice laws that might allow women to be less furtive in their activities. Others, including feminist campaigners and rightwing and religious groups, have argued for tougher penalties against the men who pay for the women's services.

Politicians too have fluctuated between the two positions. In 2004, the then home secretary David Blunkett published a consultation paper calling for debate on the issues of legalised brothels, registration for prostitutes and council-backed red-light areas; the proposal that emerged, however, was greatly watered down thanks to fears of a hostile media response, according to insiders. After the Ipswich murders, a Home Office review resulted in the powers introduced in the Policing and Crime Act, 2009, which among other things made it an offence to pay for sex from someone who had been trafficked.

After Griffiths's arrest in May, perhaps inevitably, the issue was raised once more. David Cameron said the possible question of decriminalisation of prostitution should be "looked at again", at the same time as he argued for a clampdown on kerb-crawling.

Campaigners detect no appetite for any significant policy shifts, however; the Home Office today would say only that the government "is committed to tackling the harm and exploitation associated with prostitution" and that it wanted police to "use the law, where appropriate, to tackle those who have taken advantage of those who have been forced into prostitution".

"Although there were changes in the law after Ipswich, they were certainly not in the direction of decriminalisation," says Kinnell. "The police have more powers to close down properties [in which women are working], to arrest, to do practically anything, but the argument was they would only do it in the women's interest. That is such an unrealistic expectation."

Cari Mitchell of the ECP agrees that rather than making women safer, the effect of the bill, in toughening the response to customers, has been to make sex workers less safe. "Crackdowns just drive women further underground," she says. "Any sensible person will know that if you're driven underground you're going to be less safe." The bill, she said, had been "a green light to violent men to attack women".

"Violence is not that common, but when men know you are not going to report it, men try to get away with it. Men will try to rip women off to any level, and when you're criminalised and working on the streets and people know you may be desperate, women will take risks."

While creative approaches to policing prostitution, such as in Liverpool, can have striking results, the national response, according to Kinnell, is "patchy at best". The Association of Chief Police Officers provides no guidance on interpretation of the prostitution laws, and a spokesman said it was up to individual chief constables to set the priorities for their forces. One officer working with sex workers who have been victims of rape acknowledged that the approach of vice officers and that of those attempting to support victims are often in tension.

Kinnell does detect some positive signs, however, noting that thanks to changing police and prosecutor attitudes to sex worker deaths and advances in forensics, the rate of clear-up for murder cases involving sex workers is no longer very different from that for other murders. "I would say that looking at my data since the mid-1990s, there's a huge change in the number of cases that are at least being brought to court, and most of them are resulting in a conviction."

Officers from West Yorkshire police were praised yesterday for securing Griffiths's speedy arrest and conviction, in a "stressful" operation. Det Supt Sukhbir Singh , who led the investigation, described it as dogged traditional policing "supported by developments in science and technology".

But David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Central England and the vice chair of the Howard League for Penal Reform, argues that there is a long way to go in terms of police – and public – attitudes to women who sell sex and the violence they face.

"Within police culture, no matter what we hear about the quality of policing, we know that if a prostitute goes missing and is reported as missing, that they won't be given the same priority as other people would get. I think the public statements have changed, but those public statements often hide the continuing of a private cultural phenomenon.''

An expert on serial killers, Wilson's view is that while, following high-profile multiple murder cases such as Griffiths, the temptation is to agonise over the killer's motives and psychology, the more important question is to ask why the victims of such killers are so often sex workers.

"There are always going to be a small but consistent group of people in our culture who will want to do the maximum damage to other human beings. They can't continue to do harm to other people … if they are stopped early enough, if the group of people that they initially targeted are valued enough in our culture for the police to take it seriously. We create the phenomenon of serial killing by not valuing this group of people enough."

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